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Shortly after hooking up his space-suit oxygen system, Astronaut Young had noticed acrid, ammonia-like fumes that made his eyes water, but he had not reported the problem immediately. "I figured I'd be called a sissy," he explained later. After ten minutes, though, the eyes of both astronauts were watering badly and swelling, making it difficult to see. Finally, Command Pilot Young ordered Collins to sit down and close his hatch, cutting short his scheduled experiments. Once the cabin was repressurized, the fumes were dissipated by a high-flow oxygen system. They had probably been generated by granulated lithium hydroxide, a chemical used to absorb carbon dioxide and other impurities exhaled by the astronauts, which had somehow found its way into the space-suit breathing lines.
To prepare for rendezvous with Agena 8, the astronauts ended Gemini's 38-hour union with Agena 10 by un-docking. On its own again, Gemini fired its thrusters to maneuver closer to Agena 8. Because the target vehicle's transponder had long since died, the astronauts could not use their on-board radar to calculate closing distances and speeds. Instead, they made their calculations with the aid of a reticle, a sighting device that projects a bull's-eye onto the command pilot's window. "See anything of Agena 8?" asked an anxious ground controller after several minutes of radio silence. "Yeah," replied Young coolly, "we are about seven or eight hundred feet out." "Fantastic," said Houston. "I don't believe it myself," agreed Young. It was the first space rendezvous accomplished without the use of on-board radar.
Snake House. After rendezvous with Agena 8, Young backed off about five feet to begin the last major Gemini 10 assignment: Astronaut Collins' walk in space. Carrying a hand-held nitrogen jet gun and connected to Gemini by a 50-ft. umbilical cord, he eased his way to Agena 8. From its hull, he detached an instrument that had recorded micrometeorite impacts during Agena's four months in orbit. Brought safely back to earth, the recorder will give scientists important new information about micrometeorite density in space. As Collins tugged on his umbilical to return to Gemini, a 70-mm. camera attached to his space suit somehow came loose and floated off into space.
After half an hour of EVA, Collins was suddenly ordered to end his space walk and return to Gemini. Controllers in Houston had noted that Young had reduced Gemini's fuel to an uncomfortably low level in stabilizing the craft each time Collins rocked it by climbing around the hull and by pulling on his umbilical cord. Inside Gemini again, the astronauts found themselves deluged by pieces of floating equipment used during the flight. "Say," complained Collins, "this place makes the snake house at the zoo look like a Sunday-school picnic."
An hour later, after a thorough housecleaning, Collins opened his hatch again, this time to dispose of more than a dozen troublesome items—most of them crammed into a large nylon bag. The Gemini refuse, including the umbilical cord and space-maneuvering gun, will circle the earth in a gradually decaying orbit and finally burn up iu the earth's atmosphere.